COPA is a notable authenticated online cipher and was one of the winning proposals for the CAESAR competition. Current works describe how to break the existentially unforgeable under quantum chosen message attack (EUF-qCMA) of COPA. However, these works do not demonstrate the confidentiality of COPA in the quantum setting. This paper fills this gap, considers the indistinguishable under quantum chosen-plaintext attack (IND-qCPA) security for privacy, and presents the first IND-qCPA security analysis of COPA. In addition, in order to effectively avoid the problems of quantum existential forgery attack and quantum distinguishing attack, we introduce an intermediate state doubling-point technology into COPA, restrict the associated data non-emptiness, and present an enhanced variant, called COPA-ISDP, to support the IND-qCPA and EUF-qCMA security. Our work is of great significance, as it provides a simple and effective post-quantum secure design idea to resist Simon's attack.
COPA is a notable authenticated online cipher and was one of the winning proposals for the CAESAR competition. Current works describe how to break the existentially unforgeable under quantum chosen message attack (EUF-qCMA) of COPA. However, these works do not demonstrate the confidentiality of COPA in the quantum setting. This paper fills this gap, considers the indistinguishable under quantum chosen-plaintext attack (IND-qCPA) security for privacy, and presents the first IND-qCPA security analysis of COPA. In addition, in order to effectively avoid the problems of quantum existential forgery attack and quantum distinguishing attack, we introduce an intermediate state doubling-point technology into COPA, restrict the associated data non-emptiness, and present an enhanced variant, called COPA-ISDP, to support the IND-qCPA and EUF-qCMA security. Our work is of great significance, as it provides a simple and effective post-quantum secure design idea to resist Simon's attack.
We investigate the quantum security of nonce-based encryption under the indistinguishability against quantum chosen-plaintext attacks (IND-qCPA). While classical results establish that IV-based modes such as CBC, CFB, OFB, and CTR achieve IND-qCPA security, we demonstrate that simply replacing the random IV with a nonce undermines both classical and quantum security. To address this, we propose a general transformation from R-IND-qCPA security to N-IND-qCPA security and introduce enhanced variants, namely, CBC2, CFB2, OFB2, and CTR2, that are provably secure in the nonce-based quantum setting. We further show that nonce-based stream cipher encryption inherently satisfies N-IND-qCPA security. These results provide a systematic framework for upgrading IV-based constructions to secure nonce-based counterparts, thereby strengthening practical symmetric encryption against quantum adversaries.
Authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) play a critical role in secure communication protocols, by offering confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity. However, the advent of quantum computing poses a significant threat to the security of AEAD schemes, including ISO/IEC standards such as OCB (offset codebook) and GCM (Galois/counter mode), highlighting the need for a thorough evaluation of their quantum resistance. Combined feedback mode (COFB) is a lightweight AEAD mode proposed at CHES'17, gaining significant attention due to its excellent performance in both software and hardware implementations. In this paper, we study the post-quantum security of COFB. First, we show COFB is insecure under the security notion of quantum-secure pseudo-random funtion (qPRF) by presenting an attack with a single encryption query. Next, we investigate the IND-qCPA (indistinguishability under quantum chosen-plaintext attack) security of COFB. Specifically, we show that if instantiated with a qPRF-securen-bit block cipher, the IND-qCPA security bound of COFB is roughly(Q7/4⋅ℓ11/4)/2n/2+Qℓ/2n/4, whereQdenotes the number of encryption queries andℓrepresents the maximum length (in blocks) of messages in each query. Furthermore, we extend this result to GIFT-COFB, a finalist in the NIST Lightweight Cryptography competition, and establish its security bound as(Q7/4⋅ℓ11/4)/2n/2.
With the development of quantum technology, quantum computing has an increasingly significant impact on cryptanalysis. Several quantum algorithms, such as Simon’s algorithm, Grover’s algorithm, the Bernstein–Vazirani algorithm, Shor’s algorithm, and the Grover-meets-Simon algorithm, have been proposed successively. However, almost all cryptanalysis is based on the quantum chosen-plaintext attack (qCPA) model. This paper focuses on a powerful cryptanalytic model, quantum related-key attack (qRKA), and proposes a strategy of qRKAs against symmetric ciphers using Simon’s algorithm. We construct a periodic function to efficiently recover the secret key of symmetric ciphers if the attacked symmetric ciphers satisfy Simon’s promise, and present the complexity analysis on specific symmetric ciphers. Then, we apply qRKA to the Even–Mansour cipher and SoEM construction, recover their secret keys, and show their complexity comparison in the distinct attack models. This work is of great significance for the qRKA cryptanalysis of existing provably secure cryptographic schemes and the design of future quantum secure cryptographic schemes.
We present a security model for authenticated key establishment that allows for quantum interactions between the adversary and quantum oracles that emulate classical parties, resulting in a truly post-quantum security definition. We then give a generic construction for a secure protocol in the quantum random oracle model by combining a signature scheme which is existentially unforgeable under adaptive quantum chosen message attack in the quantum random oracle model (EUF-qCMA-QRO secure) with an unauthenticated key establishment protocol which is secure against a passive adversary. This construction allows us to give an explicit example of a secure protocol whose security is based on a variant of the Diffie-Hellman problem for isogenies of supersingular elliptic curves; in particular, generic security-strengthening transformations allow us to take a signature scheme which is EUF-CMA-RO secure against a quantum adversary and transform it into an EUF-qCMA-QRO signature scheme, which we combine with a standard secure unauthenticated key establishment protocol to achieve the desired result.
Abstract Due to its innovative and performance advantages, Prøst‐COPA and Prøst‐OTR have attracted widespread attention. For the Prøst‐COPA without associated data and with associated data, the corresponding quantum key recovery attacks are proposed using Simon's algorithm, respectively. In the first scenario, the messages are used to calculate the Message Authentication Code (MAC) and construct a period function to recover the secret parameter . Then, utilizing ciphertext, a periodic function is constructed with a periodic value equal to the key value. MAC is calculated from messages and the associated data in the second scenario. Considering the impact of the associated data on the periodicity of the function, the messages are treated as a constant and further construct two periodic functions to recover the secret parameter and the key. For Prøst‐OTR, by constructing two periodic functions using two tags with different numbers of message blocks, the secret parameter can be recovered, and then the key can be recovered using Simon's algorithm. Compared to the classical attacks, the quantum‐based methods only require quantum queries (where is the message block size), resulting in an exponential speed acceleration and the success probability of the method is close to 1. These methods also show a lower query complexity than the state‐of‐the‐art quantum methods.
The OCB mode of operation for block ciphers has three variants, OCB1, OCB2 and OCB3. OCB1 and OCB3 can be used as secure authenticated encryption schemes whereas OCB2 has been shown to be classically insecure (Inoue et al., Crypto 2019). Even further, in the presence of quantum queries to the encryption functionality, a series of works by Kaplan et al. (Crypto 2016), Bhaumik et al. (Asiacrypt 2021) and Bonnetain et al. (Asiacrypt 2021) have shown how to break the unforgeability of the OCB modes. However, these works did not consider the confidentiality of OCB in the presence of quantum queries.We fill this gap by presenting the first formal analysis of the IND-qCPA security of OCB. In particular, we show the first attacks breaking the IND-qCPA security of the OCB modes. Surprisingly, we are able to prove that OCB2 is IND-qCPA secure when used without associated data, while relying on the assumption that the underlying block cipher is a quantum-secure pseudorandom permutation. Additionally, we present new quantum attacks breaking the universal unforgeability of OCB. Our analysis of OCB has implications for the post-quantum security of XTS, a well-known disk encryption standard, that was considered but mostly left open by Anand et al. (PQCrypto 2016).